I find it a little amusing that a number of people who demonized former President Donald Trump and his followers are now pretending that they played absolutely no role in what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Especially considering many of them love throwing around the term “stochastic terrorism” whenever they get the chance.
But I wasn’t exactly keeping a list, so I’m not going to start calling out names. We all know it happened.
What’s also happening, though, is a lot of people who would have privately celebrated Trump’s demise are latching onto the attempt on his life to try and push gun control.
After the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump Saturday evening, elected Democrats in Massachusetts lined up to condemn political violence and express their gratitude that Trump was safe. Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell was one of them.
In a second statement, Campbell went a step further than many of her fellow officials and said the attack illustrates the wider issue of gun violence in America.
“No one, from school children to presidential candidates, should live in fear of these horrific events — and we should not accept the status quo,” she said.
The rest of that particular piece goes into the history of the assault weapon ban, failing to note that plenty of AR-15s were available at the time regardless of the laws in place.
Of course, as I’ve been forced to point out quite a bit this week–and to think, it’s only Tuesday–former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun despite Japan having some of the most restrictive gun control laws on the planet.
Campbell was far from the only person calling for gun control. A lot of politicians were, but even some celebrities joined in the calls.
BA star Steph Curry and his Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr both expressed sadness over the attempted killing of former President Donald Trump but also called for stricter gun control.
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“This is a time where we feel very proud to represent our country wearing USA on our chest, competing in the Olympics,” Kerr told reporters while in Abu Dhabi, UAE. “We’ve talked to the players about how important it is to show the best version of us as human beings to represent our country in a respectful, dignified manner. It makes you want to do that even more so, because this is really shameful for us to sit here and think about what happened and what’s going on in our country.”
ESPN noted that Kerr’s father was assassinated in 1984 in Beirut, Lebanon, after being targeted by a militant group called Islamic Jihad. Malcolm Kerr served as the president of the American University of Beirut.
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“It’s obviously a very sad time in general,” Curry said. “All the conversations around the election and the state of politics in our country, and then you have a situation like this, which just [evokes] a lot of emotions around things that we need to correct as a people,” he said in front of a Team USA backdrop.
“Obviously, gun control first and foremost, because the fact that that’s even possible for somebody to have an attack like that. But just more so you want to [see] positivity and hope. It sounds cheesy, but it’s real. That’s when our country’s at its best, and it just adds another blemish to what’s going on. So sad is just the word,” he concluded.
No, gun control isn’t obvious.
I’m more than a little annoyed that it’s considered an obvious thing by anyone, actually.
Now, Kerr’s comments aren’t exactly shocking. He’s an anti-gunner. His father was shot and killed. That colors his perception of things, to be sure. Especially when he had no real grounding in the importance of the Second Amendment before his father’s murder.
Steph Curry isn’t as outspoken, though. He’s called for an end to violence, but not in restricting people’s rights. This is a departure for him.
Again, this is just one–well, two, actually–examples of the many who are using this to push gun control.
What they’re missing is that they can’t show how gun control would have stopped this at all. The shooter didn’t appear to have had any felonies or other disqualifying things in his history. He could have taken the same shot with a traditional hunting rifle and might have had more accuracy. Just what laws would have prevented this attack?
None.
So they’ll push for gun control, but I’m not inclined to take these calls any more seriously than any of their previous ones. Especially since we all know they wouldn’t shed a tear if Trump had been killed. For them, this is just a pretext to call for things they already wanted. This isn’t rooted in some kind of shock at the attempt on Trump’s life. It’s just the opportunity to try and push it and hope the traditional opponents of gun control are too rattled to disagree.
